After launching Hatchlings from an Iowa State dorm room, the site
started to gain a little traction in spring 2008. The founders
began working with a Google account manager to optimize ad
placements; it was told multiple times that its account was in
good standing with Google.

Suddenly, on April 18, 2011, Hatchling received this email:

Here, Google explains what it means by "invalid activity."
Hatchlings says Google never mentioned any violation of its terms
prior to the email.

When Hatchlings inquired about the blocked account, their Google
account manager didn't pick up the phone or respond to
emails. Hatchling says Google's unexpected account block
kept it from collecting $40,000.

But a thread on Y
Combinator seems to suggest Hatchlings did violate Google's
terms. It created a content site that gamed Google to make money
driving referrals to "Guitar Hero 4" on Amazon, during the time Hatchlings was live.

The Hatchlings founder writes, "I made [an additional small
content site] to drive Amazon referrals for Guitar Hero 4
pre-orders. It was SEO'd and at the top of the search results for
'Guitar Hero 4' at the time so it generated quite a bit in
affiliate revenue but almost nothing in terms of Adsense. They
never told me what was wrong with it but if I had to make a guess
it might have been flagged as a 'Made for Adsense' site since it
was pretty light on content. And as mentioned I removed the ads
from it without as much as a rebuttal. It was a no-brainer since it was so small-time
compared to Hatchlings."

The founder says he doesn't think
the Guitar Hero 4 site had anything to do with the ban though, as
there were two years in
between that site and Google's email.

One year later, the Hatchlings founder is still left scratching
his head with no word from Google. He pleads on
his blog:

"Personal Note to Google: I realize that this probably
wasn’t done maliciously and that we were probably caught up in
some algorithm gone awry. And I also realize that for the amount
of money we’re talking about you probably don’t even consider
this to be an issue worth your time. But for a startup like us
this is a huge deal. Feel free to reach out...you have my cell
number and email address. But after almost a year of being
ignored I’m not holding my breath."

When we asked Google about the incident, its PR replied pointed
us to the email from April 18 (above) and its invalid activity
explanation page.